What's behind the phenomenal success of entertainment businesses such as Warner Bros., Marvel Entertainment, and the NFL — along with such stars as Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, and LeBron James? Which strategies give leaders in film, television, music, publishing, and sports an edge over their rivals? Anita Elberse, Harvard Business School's expert on the entertainment industry, has done pioneering research on the worlds of media and sports for more than a decade. Now, in this groundbreaking audiobook, she explains a powerful truth about the fiercely competitive world of entertainment.

A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business

An inspiring yet practical guide for transforming limitations into opportunities, A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages and Why It's Everyone's Business is a book about everyday, practical inventiveness, designed for the constrained times in which we live. It describes how to take the kinds of issues that all of us face today - lack of time, money, resources, attention, know-how - and see in them the opportunity for transformation of oneself.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age

Every day brings new headlines about the decline of traditional media powerhouses like Time Inc. and the triumph of digital native media like Buzzfeed and Politico. Old media giants like the New York Times are betting everything on their digital offerings to replace the shrinking revenue from traditional advertising. But the ugly truth, argues Michael Wolff, is that digital media isn't working for any content creator, old or new.

Alibaba's World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company Is Changing the Face of Global Business

In September 2014, a Chinese company that most Americans had never heard of held the largest IPO in history - bigger than Google, Facebook, and Twitter combined. Alibaba, now the world's largest ecommerce company, mostly escaped Western notice for over 10 years, while building a customer base larger than Amazon's and handling the bulk of ecommerce transactions in China. How did it happen? And what was it like to be along for such a revolutionary ride?

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation - into the meetings, postmortems, and "Braintrust" sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture - but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, "an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible."

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.

The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business

For decades, hidden from the public eye, William Morris agents made the deals that determined the fate of stars, studios, and networks alike. Mae West, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Danny Thomas, Steve McQueen--the Morris Agency sold talent to anyone in the market for it, from the Hollywood studios to the mobsters who ran Vegas to the Madison Avenue admen who controlled television.

The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop

An original journalist for The Source, Dan Charnas built a celebrated career in the rap industry. In The Big Payback, he chronicles the rise of the hip-hop culture and shows how it became so powerful in a matter of decades. Charnas also profiles many of the movers and shakers in this burgeoning cultural movement, offering unprecedented access to an industry that continues to shake the globe.

In today's ever-changing and often-volatile business landscape, adaptability and creativity are more crucial than ever. It is no longer possible - or even desirable - to learn one set of job skills and work your way up the ladder. Rather, today's entrepreneurs and business leaders must anticipate change to create opportunities for professional success and personal satisfaction.

The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100 Million

The Sales Acceleration Formula provides a scalable, predictable approach to growing revenue and building a winning sales team. Everyone wants to build the next $100 million business, and author Mark Roberge has actually done it using a unique methodology that he shares with his listeners. As an MIT alum with an engineering background, Roberge challenged the conventional methods of scaling sales utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which he was trained to see the world.

The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks

For 60 years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged. Then came Hollywood’s Circus Maximus---created by director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave the world The Lion King---an entertainment empire called DreamWorks.

Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History: Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television

The pantheon of big-budget, commercially successful films encompasses a range of genres, including biblical films, war films, romances, comic-book adaptations, animated features, and historical epics. In Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History authors Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale discuss the characteristics, history, and modes of distribution and exhibition that unite big-budget pictures, from their beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the present.

Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film

Down and Dirty Pictures chronicles the rise of independent filmmakers and of the twin engines - the Sundance Film Festival and Miramax Films - that have powered them. Peter Biskind profiles the people who took the independent movement from obscurity to the Oscars, most notably Sundance founder Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother, Bob, made Miramax an indie powerhouse.

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

When Yahoo hired star Google executive Mayer to be its CEO in 2012 employees rejoiced. They put posters on the walls throughout Yahoo's California headquarters. On them there was Mayer's face and one word: HOPE. But one year later, Mayer sat in front of those same employees in a huge cafeteria on Yahoo's campus and took the beating of her life. Her hair wet and her tone defensive, Mayer read and answered a series of employee-posed questions challenging the basic elements of her plan.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life

From Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer and acclaimed business journalist Charles Fishman comes a brilliantly entertaining peek into the weekly "curiosity conversations" that have inspired Grazer to create some of America's favorite and iconic movies and television shows - from 24 to A Beautiful Mind.

The Little Book of Sitcom

Writing situation comedies isn’t really that hard. So much of what you need to know is already defined for you. You know that your script needs to be a certain short length, with a certain small number of characters. You know that your choice of scenes is limited to your show’s standing sets and maybe one or two swing sets or outside locations. You know how your characters behave and how they’re funny, either because you invented them or because you’re writing for a show where these things are already well established. Sitcom is easy and sitcom is fun.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever

The Sopranos. Oz. The Wire. Deadwood. The Shield. Lost. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 24. Battlestar Galactica. Friday Night Lights. Mad Men. Breaking Bad. These 12 shows, and the many more they made possible, ushered in a new golden age of television, one that made people take the medium more seriously than ever before. Alan Sepinwall became a TV critic right before this creative revolution began, was there to chronicle this incredible moment in pop culture history, and along the way changed the nature of television criticism.

How Not to Make a Short Film: Secrets from a Sundance Programmer

Featuring interviews with many of today's most talented writers, producers, and directors, as well as revealing stories (e.g., what to do when the skinhead crack addict next door begins screaming obscenities as soon as you call "action") from the sets of her own short films, Roberta walks you through the minefield of mistakes that an aspiring filmmaker can make - so that you don't have to make them yourself.

Difference: The One-Page Method for Reimagining Your Business and Reinventing Your Marketing

Marketing is not a department - it's the story of how you create difference for your customers. We spent $500 billion globally on advertising in 2013. Every year we're spending more money, to interrupt more people, more often, with messages they don't care about and don't pay attention to. We've come to believe that the way to succeed is to have an advantage - by being different or better, more visible, or just plain louder.

Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention

The former editor of Mashable and cofounder of DominateFund examines the psychological phenomena that captivate our attention--and how we can leverage them to draw and retain attention for our ideas, work, companies, and more.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.

Publisher's Summary

Why the future of popular culture will revolve around ever bigger bets on entertainment products, by one of Harvard Business School's most celebrated professors.

What's behind the phenomenal success of entertainment businesses such as Warner Bros., Marvel Entertainment, and the NFL — along with such stars as Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, and LeBron James? Which strategies give leaders in film, television, music, publishing, and sports an edge over their rivals? Anita Elberse, Harvard Business School's expert on the entertainment industry, has done pioneering research on the worlds of media and sports for more than a decade. Now, in this groundbreaking audiobook, she explains a powerful truth about the fiercely competitive world of entertainment: building a business around blockbuster products - the movies, television shows, songs, and books that are hugely expensive to produce and market - is the surest path to long-term success. Along the way, she reveals why entertainment executives often spend outrageous amounts of money in search of the next blockbuster, why superstars are paid unimaginable sums, and how digital technologies are transforming the entertainment landscape.

Full of inside stories emerging from Elberse's unprecedented access to some of the world's most successful entertainment brands, Blockbusters is destined to become required listening for anyone seeking to understand how the entertainment industry really works - and how to navigate today's high-stakes business world at large.

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